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August Newsletter:
"If I Were a Purple Muppet, I Would Have Missed It"
“Midnight waves rushing with inky stealth
Seeping into places past and well hidden
Waiting for the tide to slide back in.
To be on the other side of it
With stains on fingers, feet and deep within,
A badge of something born and worn
Until it happens all over again.”
- Andrea
Like the Talking Heads song from July’s newsletter, another image that has popped into my head with frequency is the Muppet Gonzo being shot from a cannon across the stage. Arms akimbo he lands with a crash somewhere in the shadows. How magical to be shot through the air and to land on the other side of trauma where it is quiet and (relatively) safe and the pain is gone!
Purple Muppet: Gonzo
“It’s just something you go through,” everyone said in a heartfelt attempt to console me about the death of my marriage.
True.
But I much preferred fantasizing that I was a flash of purple puppet hurtling through the sky. Pain sucks. Pain hurts. Pain is ugly. Pain is weak. Pain is a waste of time. This is what I thought of pain. Not very healing-oriented I admit. To avoid it, I flirted with the idea of packing two suitcases and getting the hell out of Dodge –away from the source of chaos and catalyst for this torrent of emotion that at times threatened to knock me flat. I am an expert at running away. I have done it with quiet regularity my whole life: It’s how I got to Jersey!
But first I thought I'd get some input …
I visited one teacher: “There are no wrong choices, but your angels and guides who are supporting you have worked hard to get you where you are. Leaving would just set you back.”
I talked to a psychic friend: “It is time to grow roots. Your tendency is to be flighty. Now it’s time to get grounded.”
Finally, I met with a psychologist friend: “What do you really want to do?”
What do I really want to do?! Huh. Good question. Underneath my flighty bravado, I really just wanted to stay home with my dogs and friends and carry on as normal. So I asked myself, If I were exactly where I am without the hurt, what would I do? The answer was easy; I would stay. Ok. Good to know. So rather than uprooting my entire life, wouldn’t it be simpler to remove the source of pain?
More people are coming to realize that what causes suffering is never anything external (person, place, thing or event), but rather our perception of it. In this way, loss (in the form of accident or illness, death, divorce or market crash) is stressful because of how we interact with that experience, i.e., the fears we attach to it. The trick then is to turn fear into hope.
No matter how unpleasant a situation is, finding the courage to really traverse the fear (because really that is what loss is) can be the most profound cleansing experience. Cleansing occurs through emotional release –being prepared to feel the pain and get it out. Once it is out, it is over and you have created more space for cleansing energy to take its place making you lighter and less resistant to the flow. Honoring the fear and experiencing it also offers an opportunity to learn more about who you are. Think of it as a teacher arriving on your doorstep disguised as a traumatic experience. It is not there to scare you into locking the doors and never coming out for the pain of it. The teacher is there to reflect back at you patterns of thought and behaviour that are not efficient to your growth.
The first step is to get honest about who you are and to accept yourself completely. We are creatures of contradiction. We have our ‘good’ aspects, which we show the world, and our ‘shadow’ aspects that we prefer to keep under wraps; the Greeks called them Demons, and the Tibetans called them Monsters. Understand though that you are looking at two sides of the same coin –yin and yang. Sometimes we have cleverly buried these shadow aspects so deeply and camouflaged them with counter thoughts and behaviours that we wouldn’t know they were there even if they doned a tutu and danced a jig in front of us.
I have spent a great deal of time in the past few weeks delving into hard to reach places in a quest to understand why I think the thoughts I think and do the things I do. The number one clunker was, ‘Why is it that when I am with a man whom I have deemed safe to love, I promptly think, “Oh great, I’m in safe hands, he’ll take care of me.” You may be thinking, “What’s so bad about that? This is true of many people in relationships” And you would be right. There is nothing bad about it. The point is, I never knew this was my pattern. It turned out that my confidence, independence and self-sufficiency was a mask I wore so no one would see how desperately I needed to be loved. I hid this aspect of myself because I considered it shameful and weak. Discovering and accepting the existence of these shadow aspects allows you to stop wasting energy pretending they are not there. The more you deny them, the harder they fight to be heard. Find them, hear them, observe them and you will eventually be able to let them go.
Every nugget of truth we uncover about ourselves puts more power back in our hands. The shadow gives up the fight, the light shines, the line that divides the two sides fades, and balance and order are resumed. You find yourself no longer trying to be good, happy, honest, independent, or fearless, you are good, happy, honest, independent and fearless.
Expression of the Divine Feminine
More than ever it is important to be accountable for who we are. As I mentioned in my last newsletter, we are intrinsically linked to the Earth’s cycle. Also as you know, our thoughts and emotions are energetic frequencies so who we are affects everything else -not only the people around us but the planet herself.
You have no doubt heard her referred to as Mother Earth. This is because she is a physical expression of the feminine qualities of beauty, creativity, stability, sensuality, fertility, joy and harmony. She is peace. She is love. She is a being with her own consciousness. Yes, we live on the earth, but we are of the earth also: we breathe her air, we eat her food, and we drink her water, and when our physical body dies, it returns to her. Over the past thirty or so years we have seen the environmental movement gain momentum. This illustrates how humanity has been activated by the Divine Feminine energy. It is a symbiotic relationship; the more people who align themselves with her, the better off the planet and everything on her will be.
While going green, planting trees and cleaning up waste are wonderful steps, this is not what she needs. With one shake of her crust, she could cleanse herself and start over. How we can truly help her is to connect with and embody our own feminine aspects. To repeat a few: beauty, creativity, sensuality, harmony and joy.
For both men and women the Divine Feminine energy has been culturally suppressed for eons: women have handed over the power, and men have exerted it. Raising our consciousness and healing ourselves has a profound effect on the Earth's journey. It is time to bring the two halves –the Divine Feminine and the Divine Masculine, into balance.
First step: Being ok with being YOU:
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Accept Yourself: Explore the dark side of your coin. Own up to these fears. When you accept them as legitimate parts of the whole self, they cease to be threatening and can actually become your ally, ultimately resulting in transcendence because you simply do not need them anymore.
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Love Yourself: Every time you hand your power over, you are not acting out of love for yourself. Now is the time for global self-acceptance. The capacity we have to love others is directly proportional to how well we love and accept ourselves. Be compassionate, be understanding, have gratitude and be prepared to forgive yourself. Take a moment out of your busy day to sit comfortably with hands over your heart, recall a time when you felt blissfully loved, and then imagine that you are providing that level of love for yourself. |
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Forgive Yourself: You are perfect in your imperfections. Forgive yourself for being different, i.e., you! Allow yourself to eat chocolate, drink wine, get angry, cry for seemingly no reason. It’s all ok. There is a reason why you need the chocolate or wine, why you are angry or need to cry. Honor it. Let it surface and rise up so you can go through it and let it become a part of the past.
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One more thought before I go:
"The planet heals when you heal."
Namaste!
Andrea
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